Last year at Comoc Con, Legendary Entertainment surprised the crowd with a very early teaser trailer for Gareth Edwards‘ Godzilla. The test footage kicked Hall H’s ass and was one of the most talked about things of that year’s Con. Warner Bros has returned a year later with Edwards, alongside cast members Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor Johnson and Bryan Cranston to premiere a new teaser trailer, our first look at actual footage from the film. Read all about it, and find what was said on the panel, after the jump.

Things we learned from the panel:

Godzilla finished the last day of shooting two days ago, with a night shoot in Hawaii.

Edwards touted the creative freedom the producers and studio gave him was incredible.

Elizabeth Olsen was surprised that it didn’t feel like making a huge budget film and that she wasn’t waiting around the set for hours in between setups.

Olsen plays a Nurse and a mother in the film. Based on the trailer, she seems to be a refugee of sorts, as we see her as she reunites with a young girl in a sports stadium that has been converted into a shelter.

Bryan Cranston wasn’t sure if this would be a good project for him to do because it was “too huge.” He wasn’t sure that stepping into those shoes was a good idea, but after watch Edwards’ Monsters and talking to the filmmaker, he became convinced.

It was important to Edwards that the characters they followed in the movie were at the center of the Godzilla story, he didn’t want it to be two separate story lines.

The code name for the film was “Nautilus”.

Edwards approached this film as his passion project and not a blockbuster.

In addition to the test footage teaser they showed last year at Comic-Con, Edwards brought a new teaser trailer to Comic Con. I’m not sure when, or if, this trailer will be online, but Russ Fischer has compiled a description below:

We’re introduced to characters first off: Cranston seems to be an engineer/investigator of some sort — we see him in hazmat gear, and later running towards a crisis event in a government installation as the rest of the staff frantically runs away. Aaron Taylor Johnson is a soldier; Ken Watanabe is seen in a control room of some kind, and Olsen as mentioned above is shown in moments that suggest she’s been a victim of some disaster. A montage of various images shows a world in crisis and deploying military forces to fight some crisis moment.

And then there’s the kaiju attack. The first monster we see is a spindly-legged insectoid thing — is this Mothra? Didn’t quite look like it, but that’s possible. The monster is attacking an airport, and there’s a great wide shot that sees the kaiju destroying a plane, which leads to an explosion the camera follows by panning across a huge set of windows, looking out from inside the airport terminal. Part of the plane’s destroyed fuselage flies right to left across the screen, and is eventually stopped as it crashes into a giant foot.

That’s the intro for Godzilla, and the creature dwarfs the other kaiju. Few shots really show Godzilla, but the scale is very effectively communicated by the relationship between the insectoid monster and our favorite lizard. The overall effect could be described — and this isn’t a literal account of the footage, but an impression of its effect — like a slow pan up from the faces of the various human characters stuck in the middle of a monster-created mess, passing a smaller beast and finally trying to focus on the father of it all, Godzilla, hidden in fire and smoke.

My reaction: obviously this is an early teaser, but I’m surprised how character centric the footage looked. We didn’t see much huge destruction, but when it did happen it was awesome. The one shot dolly inside the airport with the destruction ricocheting like a bunch of dominos was a masterful composition and a refreshing take on large scale destruction.